When you receive a Statement from your Bank, it is important to check it against your Nominal Bank Account transactions, to ensure that both are correct.

The tool that Access provides for this is in the Cash Book module.

The Cash Book module provides extensive facilities for Reconciling your Bank Accounts, and for viewing and consolidating your Petty Cash Accounts.

To simplify the entry of missing Transactions, the main Cash Book window provides a direct means of entering Sales, Purchase, and Nominal Transactions.

Before you use the Cash Book, you must have flagged the relevant Nominal Account Records as ‘Bank’ type Accounts or as ‘Petty Cash’ type Accounts. It is only Records that are flagged in this way that can be accessed through this module.

You can change a Nominal Account record to be a Bank or Petty Cash Account at any time. This is useful if you wish to reconcile any Nominal Account. However the information displayed on the Cash Book window (Opening Balance, Income, Expenses, Current Balance) is only updated by Transactions, if the flag is set on the Account before the Transactions are actually posted.

You can use the Petty Cash flag for monitoring Cash Floats or Company Loans etc.

Among the reports that the Cash Book provides, is one that to make comparisons easy, looks like the official Bank Statement. Another is a Reconciliation report, that shows the Current Reconciled Balance, the Unreconciled Transactions (with Income and Expense Transactions shown separately), and the current Unreconciled Balance.

Note: Unreconciled Transactions are not purged, therefore it is a good idea to carry out both Bank and Cash reconciliations BEFORE purging any Transactions. If you reconcile these Bank and Petty Cash Accounts regularly, when you eventually need to carry out a reconciliation, you will avoid a huge number of Transactions being involved.

To reconcile your Bank Statement:

The Reconciliation list window enables you to display:

either a list of Unreconciled Transactions up to the Transaction Date that you enter, so that you can Reconcile them,

or a list of reconciled Transactions from a Transaction Date that you enter, so that you can Unreconcile them.

Initially this will be blank until you have indicated what you want to do, and the Transactions you are interested in.

You should take care to tick off your computer records in exactly the same sequence that they appear on the Bank Statement.

The order in which they are reconciled is saved back into the Transaction with the Reference, when you click on OK.

Note: If no Date is entered, all Transactions are shown.

A Search Criteria window will be displayed for you to refine your working list. Enter the criteria and click on the Display icon on this window.

The Reconciliation window will now list any Unreconciled Transactions for the current Bank Account, up to the Date and matching the Criteria you have entered.

This list can be sorted in various ways, and shows Receipts (Money Paid In to the Bank) and Payments (Money Paid Out from the Bank), subtotalled in various ways. The individual Transactions making up each sub-total are shown in the lower part of the window.

This list can be used to reconcile your official Bank Statement, by ticking each line off against the Statement.

The current Reconciled and Unreconciled Balances for the account will be shown at the right hand side of the window.

In the top part of the window, subtotals by Date (the default), for all Receipts and Payments are shown in Ascending order, however, clicking on the Date menu gives further alternatives.

This option works well if you only bank once a day, using one Paying In slip. If you use multiple slips each day, you should enter a Paying In Reference in the Batch Ref. field, and use this button menu to subtotal by this field.

To help you match the single line entries on the official Bank Statement, that represent multiple cheques that were lodged with the Bank on a single Paying In slip, this menu provides a sub-totalling facility.

This means that each figure displayed in a column may represent several Transactions which all have the same Date.

The Sort menu enables you to change the sequence in which the Transactions appear in the list. The exact content of this window varies according to the subtotalling option selected above.

Note: The Sort by Date will be disabled if Subtotalling by Date is selected.

In the lower part of the window the components of the subtotal selected in the top list are shown, so that they can be reconciled individually, and to help you resolve anomalies or errors.

Save the reconciliation you have done so far, by clicking on the OK icon.

Use the function icons on the Cash Book window to enter the required transaction.

Return to the Reconciliation window where you will find that the transactions you have already reconciled have been removed from the list and the transaction you have just entered is now visible.

If you follow the steps above, you can print a computer Statement that will closely resemble your official Bank Statement.

Clicking this button enables you to print a variety of Reconciliation reports.

Reconciliation Report

This shows the Opening Balance, the Income/Receipts and Expense/Payments Totals and a Closing Balance (this should be the same as the Balance on your Bank Statement).

It then shows the Unreconciled Expense and Income Transactions and the Cash Book Balance.

Statement Report

Prints a report in Statement format for the selected Bank Account. This requires the entry of a Statement Reference and the Opening Balance from the Statement to be printed. Can be sub-totalled if required.

Transactions will be printed on the Statement in the order in which they were actually reconciled.

Full Reconciled Audit /Unreconciled Audit

This enables you to select the Year and Period from which you wish to print the Reconciled or Unreconciled Transactions. In the case of the Reconciled Audit, you can also select by Statement Reference.

Print Displayed Transactions

This lists the Transactions shown on the Reconciliation (or Unreconciliation) list window.